Attorney General Merrick Garland displayed visible discomfort when a reporter persistently questioned him about the appropriateness of special counsel Robert Hur’s remarks regarding President Joe Biden’s age and memory in a recent report, which the White House criticized as unwarranted and inaccurate.
Since the release of Hur’s report scrutinizing Biden’s handling of sensitive documents, Biden and his supporters have contested the accuracy and intent behind Hur’s critical comments about the president. This contention was echoed by Democrats during a recent congressional hearing featuring Hur.
During a press conference announcing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Garland addressed reporters’ inquiries and defended the autonomy the Biden administration has upheld within the Department of Justice. However, when pressed about Hur’s language, Garland bristled at the suggestion that he should intervene to modify or suppress Hur’s statements:
REPORTER: On the special Counsel Robert Hur’s report. You personally have come in for a lot of criticism, in particular from the White House, anonymous officials who say that you should have acted to keep him from characterizing the president’s memory the way he did in that report, that you should have stepped in. What’s your response to that?
AG MERRICK GARLAND: I haven’t, no one from the White House has said that to me.
When the president announced my nomination, he said, to me directly and then to the American public that he intended to restore the independence and the integrity of the Justice Department. And that he wanted me to serve as the lawyer for the American people, not the lawyer for the president.
I sincerely believe that that’s what he intended then, and I sincerely believe that that’s what he intends now.
REPORTER: But did you think that that was appropriate, the language that he used to characterize the president’s mental state?
AG MERRICK GARLAND: Look, they — I said from the very beginning that I would make public the report of the special — of all the special counsel appointed during a period of my service.
That is consistent with the regulation, which requires a special counsel to explain what the special counsel’s decisions are. It’s consistent with the precedents. The full disclosure of all special counsel reports in the entire 25 years in which the regulation has been in effect.
It’s consistent with the common practice during the previous period of the independent counsel statute.
The idea that an attorney general would edit or redact or censor the special counsel’s explanation for why the special counsel reached the decision that special counsel did? That’s absurd.
